October 08, 2015

The Whining Of The Online Ad Industry

Now that the adolescent online ad industry is facing its first serious crisis, we are experiencing exactly the kind of behavior we should expect from juveniles -- whining.

The growing problem of ad blocking has generated a chorus of infantile bellyaching from online publishers and their apologists.

First, they are exaggerating the problem to gain our sympathy. The IAB claims that 34% of adults are using ad blockers. I am highly suspicious of this number. In fact, I'd be surprised if 34% of people even know that ad blockers exist. My guess is that the actual number of ad blocking software users is closer to half this number.

Next they say that there is an unwritten agreement between publishers and users. Publishers provide free content and, in return, we are obligated to receive the ads they send us. This is a lousy argument. The internet is not free. I write a hefty little check to my internet provider every month. The fact that online publishers have a dumbass business model and do not get any part of this revenue is not my fault or my problem.

They say publishers are going to go out of business and the websites we love are going to disappear. I doubt it. If 95% of the websites in the world disappeared tomorrow, there would still be a thousand times as many as we'd ever need.

The online ad industry does not understand its problem. The problem is ad tech. And the longer they cling to the obnoxious model of ad tech that currently exists, the worse their problems are going to get.

People are only mildly averse to advertising. They tolerate it in many forms in many media. What people hate is the type of ultra-annoying, creepy advertising that has been enabled by online ad tech.

If they would dump their addiction to ad tech a large number of their problems - fraud, blocking, price deflation - would take a nice step toward evaporating.

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Shakespeare was a storyteller. You're a copywriter.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business requires sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."